IT’S that time of year when men you hardly know sidle up to you in bars with strange, kindly smiles.

They are obviously going to talk to you, although they never have before. Then mysteriously from behind their back comes a plastic bag with something bulging from it in a shapeless mass. The smile gets wider. You hesitate. But the smile has gripped you now. The hand puts the package down in front of you. The smile moves and now words come from lips that were silent in the past: “Thought you’d like some of my runner beans.”

Aaaaaarrrrgggghhhhh! You’ve been veggy-dumped. And then to make it worse you say: “Oooh, thank you ever so

much ... you sure? You must have a pint for that.” The kindly smile retreats to an expression of mock virtue.

I now know to avoid eye contact at this time of year with anyone carrying a plastic bag

Oh great, I insist. Have a pint.

“Oh all right,” says Mr-Never-Smiled-Before.

Then you have to stand around and chat with Mr-Never-Talked-To- You-Before while realising he’s cost you £3.50 and why it was you never talked to him before anyway.

While you are trying to make pretty inane conversation with him you wonder whether he’s not the same chap who accosted you out of the blue last year (probably in the same bar) and said: “Get that bag of apples I left on your gate?”

And you can hear yourself saying: “Oh, it was you, was it? Oh, gosh, thanks very much. So kind! Look, let me get you a pint...”

Or was it that fellow with the courgettes? Or the marrows? Or the Victoria plums that came not only with a plastic bag but its own portable wasps’ nest. Or those rock- hard pears you couldn’t eat. Or the limp celery. Or those mouldy turnips? Or the bendy carrots?

And what about that bloke with those unprintable allotment pota- toes with so many eye-holes that, after gouging the earth out of them, you just had knobbly bits of spud and seven incisions in each hand from the potato knife?

And then a couple of years ago there was Pork-Chop-Willie, the man who raises his own pigs. He caught me one day. Plonked them down in front of me, held his hand out and said: “There you are, a tenner!”

“A tenner what?” I said. “A tenner for the finest pork chops you’ll ever eat in your life,” he said. I gave him a tenner. I ate one of them, once I’d hired a chainsaw to disrobe the fat from all round it. Very nice.

THE other two chops are still languishing in the freezer somewhere below the three bags of this year’s runner beans, the remains of brown-husked broad beans, some shrivelled peas and a couple of punnets of someone’s yellow tomatoes.

I’m all in favour of people growing things, rearing their own, tilling gardens and plots, but why are they so possessed of their own virtue at doing it and presume, like their first- born child, that their purple cabbage is beyond doubt the finest brassica anyone ever grew anywhere and the world is on its knees begging to consume it?

I remember being sad when one old village veggy-dumper passed away and thought that would be the end of buying him pints. But then his brother appeared with dangling runner beans sticking from a brown paper bag.

“Them’s for you,” he insisted. “And them’s for you,” he said to the landlord, savouring the prospect of two pints.

“Straight from my brother’s garden.”

“But your brother only died last week,” said the landlord.

“Well, he won’t want them where he’s gone to, will ’ee?”

MY NEW strategy is to become a veggy-dumping detector. I now know to avoid eye contact at this time of year with anyone carrying a plastic bag, chaps with bits of sweet pea ties around their collars and anyone who shuffles into a pub beaming goodwill with dirty knees where he’s been digging out his lettuce.

There is also the sneaky-dumper who says: “ ’ere, you live at No3, don’t you?” When you say yes, he says: “Right I’ll drop something really nice in for you tomorrow.”

And there it will be, hanging on your gate, home-grown chillies that have been clogging up his green- house. So I now say: “No, No5 actually...” and let the world take care of itself.

I am also working on a counter strategy of pretending that I too have an allotment. I shall turn the tables by boasting about my non-existent beetroot, my kohlrabi, two- foot long cucumbers and several varieties of horseradish no one can bear to eat.

Not to say my speciality. I shall declare: “I’ve got some lovely pumpkins in my cold frame just now...”

Watch fear enter the eye of the button-holed and add: “One just ripe. Lovely 25-pounder. I’ll drop it round.”